On the contrary my fellow denizens, bigger is better in this age of steel!
A warship must be more than just fast, it must be more than well armed, and it must be more than well armored. It must be all of these things!
To combine all of these things into a single package is a difficult task indeed and the lower a ship's allowed displacement, the more compromises must occur to get a ship that does not capsize upon leaving dry dock.
This is why we must reject the paradigm of restrained tonnage to the greatest extent possible! Only through possessing the most powerful single warships afloat, through a qualitative advantage, will it be possible to deal with the Empire's opponents.
None of us are fond of putting all our eggs in one basket, I understand this, but to play the mathematical game of attrition with the other powers is untenable!
If our ships are merely en par with our opponents as we conform to international norms of the displacement of an armored cruiser or battleship, we will always find ourselves outnumbered even by the damn Savoyards.
Such calculations are not favorable.
Only through the production of such vessels that are sufficiently superior to break the traditional paradigm of statistical attritional war will it be possible to deliver the blows necessary to win victory in war!
We cannot stand in line and trade blows. We must be faster to pin them against a coastline. We must outrange the enemy so that we may reach out and slam them with a 500 kg shell beyond their ability to retaliate! We must have such extensive and innovative protection that our ships shrug of blows that would annihilate a lesser foe!
As we have seen how little time it takes for even the greatest of state technological secrets to be released to the winds, such as the French attempting to hoard their smokeless powder for a time, the only way to achieve this superiority is through the supremacy of each and every ship!
And can you yet , look at the way that the bigger is better paradigm is not serving the british well, if you compare their battleships for example to the russian ones?
How our Szigetvar has only a minimal difference in Destructive power compared to the russian Armored cruisers class of the Paladana, and yet there is a difference of more then 10 percent in size in their favor. Wasted size and steel!
Our current Cruiser and Destroyer sized are already at the upper limit for worldwide sizes of these classes, and yet my collegue wishes to go for size over technology there to use our size better then to waste steel just to obtain empty displacement!
And while the Itallian Battleships outsize ours, they do not outeffect ours ! And yes there is a displacement gap in their favor.
Which is a issue of Crusiers , not Battleships as the difference between ours and the Italians for the Queens of the Ocean is minimal, but we did not appear on the
dancecard for the armored and heavy Cruisers!
The combined displacement of Crusiers , light Cruisers at that, is bigger then the difference between our battleship fleet and the itallian Battleship fleet!
And that is without the armored cruisers where they are bringing in enough speed to steam away from our ships, and hunt our cruisers prevent our ships to force them into a fight unless we get into the range of shore batteries.
The Italians have as much additional cruiser tonnage over us as we have battleship or cruiser tonnage in total!
Trying to catch them via single ships in this case is fatal as while we hunt one ship three others can strike at our shipping.
Steel has to be used in the most efficent way , which can be a armored cruiser, or a battleship but which is not by itself always the biggest ship of their class as we can see with the new British Ships that have less then 300 tons between their battleships and their Armored cruisers into a newfound uggly hybrid!
If you try to catch two bird at the same time, you stand without a bird in the end, so we need to deliberately ensure that we have the right tool for the right problem. Else I am inviting my college to go forth and secure the Danube on a battleship!
